This is indeed a good time for lemonade

[brynndragon]

My car has died. The starter motor does its thing quite well, but the engine won't turn over (well, one attempt it almost caught at the very end, but died practically before I noticed it catching). My not-quite-educated guess is it's a fuel issue, meaning it's a problem with the pump (failure), a problem with the injectors (crud or failure), a problem with the fuel line (vacuum leak), or a problem with the tank (crud in tank blocking intake). None of these problems are within my capacity to test for, much less repair, so off to Funhondas goes Nekokaburi. However, Chang is out until the 14th.

This would make me a very sad panda, but for my beloved Ankai (and the lovely wsmith, who gave me a ride to grab Ankai). For the next while, I will have my bike as my sole means of transportation. This is new and interesting to me; we'll see how it works. I'm guessing, unless we get some *really* nasty rainstorms, it will work very well indeed.

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I probably should have used the word "cranks" rather than "turns over" - the idea being that there's definitely electricity in the system. I'd be really surprised if it was the spark plugs, I put in high quality new ones around 5k miles ago. I replaced the fuel filter around that time as well. The one time when it fired for a brief second before dying is what makes me think it's a fuel issue.

Well, that plus the odd "idle to off" behavior it exhibits sometimes when trying to start it under very specific circumstances (70+ degrees outside, very short trip (< 5-10 min), very short time off (also < 5-10 min) - this happens when going to grab lunch to eat at work, for example). It will start like normal, with initial RPMs about 1k above idle, but when it tries to go down to idle speed it instead falls all the way to nothing. Giving it enough gas to keep it at the higher RPMs immediately on startup, then slowly letting the RPMs drop to idle prevents that behavior - it really sounds like vapor lock, but this is a fuel-injected car. So I think there's something screwy with the fuel delivery system somewhere, and it finally got bad enough to keep the car from running. We'll see.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, to me that suggests wonky coils or sensors. Fuel injected cars simply don't get vapor lock, but it sounds like you know that.